WSA Identifying Need & Monitoring Impact

Reading and resources 

• Measuring Wellbeing in Schools - An excellent blog from What Works Wellbeing. The blog introduces recent work on children and young people’s subjective wellbeing and marks the publication of a comprehensive bank of measures of children’s wellbeing. It is a massive peice of work and a rather daunting excel spreadsheet! but if you want to check out a specific measure you can look it up. It is accompanied by a very useful user guide. (worth reading to find about more about best practice in undertaking wellbieng measurement). 
  
  
• Using measurement tools to understand pupils’ mental health needs:a guide for schools and colleges Anna Freud National Centre for Children and Families (pdf)
  
  
• Measuring and monitoring children and young people’s mental wellbeing: A toolkit for schools and colleges Anna Freud National Centre for Children and Families et al  (pdf)
  
  
• CORC have an excellent online resource with links and details of a huge number of questionnaires / surveys although not all suitable for school / general use.  A good exampleof of one that can be used is the Me & My Feelings (M&MF) measure, sometimes referred to as Me & My School, is a brief 16 item school-based measure of child mental health, covering two broad domains: emotional difficulties and behavioural difficulties. (see the next section on free resources too).  
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• Tools for gathering the views of children and young people (pdf) Originally written for use by educational psychologist and others supporting C&YP with additional needs. There are some excellent ideas / activities. Well worth a look, especially if you are looking for something to use for a specific child.
  
  
• A guide to measuring children’s well-being (PDF) - Action for Children / New Economics Foundation. The guide gives a quick overview of the benefits and the scope of subjective well-being indicators to shape and improve measurement tools for the future.
  
  
• DfE’s ‘State of the nation 2022: children and young people’s wellbeing’ report

Free tools

CORC (part of the work of the Anna Freud Centre) have launched a suite of free Wellbeing Measurement for Schools (WMfS) resources. These have been developed to support schools to design their own questionnaires and surveys to understand more about the wellbeing of the pupils in their schools.  

The resources include tried and tested sets of questions covering five broad areas of wellbeing, each with various questionnaires to choose from, and a comprehensive step-by-step guide and additional resources. The five areas are:

1. Emotional health 
2. Emotional strengths and skills 
3. Relationships 
4. School life 
5. Help and support 

Please visit our Measuring pupil wellbeing pages to download these new modular surveys and our step-by-step guides. These resources sit in the schools section on our website, which has been refreshed over the summer, and now features:

• Measuring staff wellbeing 
• Support for schools  
• Measuring wellbeing in colleges 
• Measuring wellbeing in the early years 

Wellbeing Questionnaire  a simple too available free to download from the excellent ELSA Support website suitable for primary / secondary.

The Good Childhood Index is the index of subjective well-being for children aged eight and over. It was created by the Children’s Society in 2010. They wanted to develop an index of children’s well-being that is statistically robust and covers the main aspects of children’s lives, including those identified by children themselves. Paper version. The short version is freely available to schools to use. (and user friendly) Upper KS2 up. We have created a simple online tool using the short version. Contact us for details.

Turnaround for Children - Wellbeing Index
Each student has unique strengths and needs that are dynamic and guide how they engage and learn. Educators informally try to assess how students are doing with quick chats in the hall or through the observation of behavior, and this may give educators some information – but it’s challenging to know exactly what’s happening with every student, every day. The Well-Being Index (WBI) is a tool designed to help educators collect holistic student data – physical, social, psychological and emotional well-being – systematically, directly, quickly and in real time. This is a wellbeing measurement tool created in the USA so the tools are designed for elementary / secondary settings.  It is freely available (if you sign up to the site for free) and comes with user guides and scoring tools.

Measuring a sense of belonging

• Classroom Belonging Scale
• School Belonging Scale
• Psychological Sense of School Membership Scale
• School Bonding Questionnaire

Online tools with cost

The Boxhall Profile is an online assessment tool for social emotional and behavioural difficulties for children and young people. Often used as part of Nurture provision in schools. Information booklet: The Boxall Profile For the assessment of children and young people’s social emotional wellbeing

Motional is an easy-to-use online tool for identifying, assessing, and improving the emotional health and wellbeing of children and young people.  It can record ACE and Protective Factor scores where required and gives staff a whole-brain picture of students' mental health and wellbeing. 

Pupil Attitudes to Self and School (PASS) help you to understand the whole pupil by screening for hidden issues of low self-esteem, barriers to learning, mental health and emotional difficulties.

Schools' Health Education Unit (SHEU) offer health and wellbeing questionnaires for young people in every phase of education, online or on paper. It covers physical health and mental wellbeing. 

Wellbeing Measurement Framework In collaboration with colleagues from CORC, the University of Manchester and Common Room, EBPU have developed the Wellbeing Measurement Framework (WMF), a suite of measurement tools for primary school, secondary school and college students. Each WMF tool contains a set of validated questionnaires (tailored to each age group) that assess constructs such as positive wellbeing, behavioural or emotional difficulties, the presence and strength of protective factors such as perceived support at school, home and in the community, and ability to deal with stress and manage emotions. The WMF was used as the evaluation tool for Headstart areas across the Country yielding excellent and insightful results.

• WMF Primary booklet
• WMF Secondary booklet

YP and the Wellbeing Measurement Framework in Cornwall

Bounce Together An online mental health and wellbeing survey platform designed for schools.